Burnout Dominator Update

Share.

We take a spin in a near-final build of the fastest racer on the planet.

By Chris Roper

The best arcade racing series on the planet is about to return to the PlayStation 2 and PSP. While Criterion is hard at work on Burnout 5 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, current-gen PlayStation fans needn't feel left out in the cold as Burnout Dominator looks sure to burn up their systems.

A throwback to the Burnout days of old, Dominator focuses on pure racing rather than some of the more extraneous things that have been introduced to the series lately. Traffic checking, for instance is out, as is the old favorite Crash mode, unfortunately. However, the franchise's namesake Burnouts are back and more important than ever, lending credence to EA UK's goal of making this as white-knuckled as can be.

We recently received a near-final build of the game and have been able to dig into a good portion of the start of the game. So far, the game seems to stay very much true to the Burnout groundwork of old, helped in large part by the fact that it utilizes the Burnout Revenge engine. This means that the dead-perfect controls and blistering framerate that we've seen in the past are still intact.

As mentioned, Burnouts play a huge part in Dominator. For the uninitiated, Burnouts were last seen in Burnout 2: Total Impact and were achieved when you waited until your boost meter was full, and then expended the entire meter in one long boost. Clearing it this way refills it, and each subsequent time you do so you're awarded with a X2, X3 or more multiplier.

While the speed attained with this is obviously important, it's these multipliers that are paramount to your success in Burnout Dominator. While points don't really matter in races or Road Rage events, they're the focus of the Drift, Near Miss, Burnout and new Maniac challenges. In order to score well on these, you'll need to keep a long Burnout chain going. It seems to us that if you were to break the chain in the later portion of the game, you'd have no hope in completing these challenges. This could wind up meaning that absolute perfection is needed at the later stages of the game, much like how the Burning Laps forced a flawless performance.

While the build that we're playing is near-final, there is one major issue that we ran into in that the game will sometimes cut off your current boost for what seems like no good reason, ending any Burnout chain that you have going. This happens often enough that we really do hope it'll get worked out in the final version, and we fully assume it will.

After we've put numerous upon numerous hours into the next-gen version of Burnout Revenge, it can be hard going back to a standard-def racing game this quick as you need to relearn how to look for oncoming traffic all over again. High-def certainly helps in a game like Burnout, but unfortunately we don't have that option here. Luckily though, EA UK has done a good job in helping players notice cars off in the distance. For oncoming cars, rather than their headlights being white they're actually a light tint of blue. This makes them much easier to pick out in the horizon and distinguish the cars from the scenery.

So far the track design has been pretty solid. It's obvious that the UK guys were big fans of Burnout 2 as Dominator features as many long, looping turns as the second game in the series did. We're fans of this design as well as it's extremely fun to whip around a turn at high speed while trying to stay sideways for as long as possible. Cool stuff.

Burnout Dominator is scheduled for release in early March, so our review should be coming along in a few short weeks. Get your racing gloves on...